Graupner GR-12L Receiver Teardown

This is a general teardown and summary of the Graupner GR-12L R/C 2.4Ghz HoTT Receiver and it's main internal components

PhillyFlyers

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Description

I wanted to see how well built the Graupner GR-12L receiver is, and what it's packing inside. Removing the plastic cover is quite easy, it's just a couple of snaps. But the bottm of the receiver PCB is completely covered in a metal grounded shield, that is soldered all the way around directly to the PCB.

Even after wicking all of the edges free of the solder, it was still quite difficult to remove, I ended up removing it with some force via a pair of needle nose pliers. The shield was destroyed, but luckily the PCB is still intact and the receiver still works.

Details

The receiver is a very slick and compact design, well layed out 4-layer PCB. The receiver is 36 x 21 x 10 mm in size, and only 0.25 oz.

Thanks to the simplicity of SoC chips today, the Texas Instruments CC2510 is the main CPU of the receiver, and the Texas Instruments CC2591 is piggy-backed onto the CC2510 for extended 2.4Ghz range.

So the entire Rx design is really just three main components along with a bunch of passive parts and the usual 3.3v regulator for the input supply. The CC2510 is a System-On-Chip Transceiver module, with an enhanced 8051 core along with 32kB flash.

1) Texas Instruments CC2510 - 2.4 GHz Radio Transceiver, 8051 MCU, and 32 KB Memory

2) Texas Instruments CC2591 - 2.4-GHzRF Front End

3) Clock Module - 26.000 Mhz clock module for CPU

Project Logs

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08/31/2020
PhillyFlyers • 09/01/2020 at 00:05 • 0 comments

Just did the initial teardown of this unit, and capture and upload of the photos. I really like the compact and yet simple design, effective use of the two CI components yields a nice new 2.4Ghz SoC core, along with an RF extender.

The GR-12L gives you 6 channels, and the included HoTT telemetry.
There is a 5-pin debug header on the top side of the PCB, which is the usual Texas Instruments 'CC Debug' header. I didn't even bother to hook up a debugger at this point, because I am pretty much certain Graupner enabled the 'protection' bits in the CC2510 chip, to prevent any readout of the firmware.